


I Saw A Blackened Ruin (The Across a Distant Sea Remix)

by significantowl



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Jane Eyre Fusion, Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Implied Erik/Magda, Jamaica, M/M, Mental Instability, Remix, Telepathy, Vows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/significantowl/pseuds/significantowl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Charles stands with his hand clasped in his husband’s long grip, smiling at well-wishers until his face aches. Until the crowds begin to thin, and the bells die away, and his ears begin to catch on the lonely cries of the gulls.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(Erik is Rochester, Charles is Bertha Mason, and sometimes vows must be forged anew.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Saw A Blackened Ruin (The Across a Distant Sea Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/gifts).
  * Inspired by [i saw a blackened ruin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1936461) by [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red). 



  
_Erik’s voice is desperate as he ascends the roof, broken and cracked, but it pierces nonetheless. Through the fire, through the smoke, through the years._

_Delight bursts within Charles, a bright shower of sparks. Erik, Erik is saying his name, Erik’s voice is the best voice. Charles would hear it more than all the others. Charles would hear it always._

::

Gulls wheel through the cloudless blue of the sky, silhouettes dark against the sun, their voices lost beneath the jangled clamour of cathedral bells and the bright joy burning in Charles’ blood. He and Erik are one now, in the eyes of the law and of society, and the bells herald their union to all of Spanish Town as such: lives and hearts and bodies and fortunes so joined that none shall put asunder.

Yet this is not a house of Erik’s faith, and Charles’ own relationship with the heavens is one of estrangement; today they have parroted words to a priest, but other vows carry more weight, offered each to each in the deep quiet of a night when all words were true. 

Charles stands with his hand clasped in his husband’s long grip, smiling at well-wishers until his face aches. Until the crowds begin to thin, and the bells die away, and his ears begin to catch on the lonely cries of the gulls.

::

The great heat of the sun burns from dawn to dusk, a pure, searing heat, indifferent to all that live beneath it. Yet it suffers the sugarcane to grow tall; it tints Charles’ English skin with a rosiness Erik professes to find sweetly appealing; it slows Charles’ blood and quiets the race of his thoughts, the island’s thoughts, making light the dark places and cauterising what wounds it touches as a matter of course.

The sun is inescapable. Even behind lowered lids, the world glows.

Charles sees his husband work. He sees him smile. He sees him love.

::

Contrary to the whispers that rise voiced and unvoiced round the island like clouds of fruit-flies, their marriage is not built upon the draw of Charles’ wealth and position, however likely such a thing may seem. Charles makes Erik laugh; makes him sigh; makes him gasp beneath the sheets; all in the usual ways of lovers, rich or poor. He wastes no hours wondering whether Erik would have married him in the absences of his monies, of his lands.

But the powers they each possess, which lie beyond all standard measure and pass into the realm of the incredible: these are Erik’s glory. Charles’ imagination cannot stretch to a version of himself with no such power, with a mind that is as bordered and contained as a well, who still wears Erik’s band upon his finger.

It does not have to.

But for all of this: for all Erik delights in Charles’ strength, for all he surrounds himself with the powered at all turns (employing them whenever possible, raising societal brows by paying wages unheard of among workers in the cane fields: _Lehnsherr must believe gold drips from Xavier’s fingertips_ , the whispers say), he has reservations about the particular nature of Charles’ talent. Its reach, its scope. Its place in a household. In a marriage. 

_Your mind will always be your own_ , Charles swore, one vow among many, on a night when each promised love, and faithfulness, and belonging.

Erik wishes to believe Charles’ power can be kindled and doused as easily as a lamp on a table, one that Charles lights only when circumstances merit and extinguishes neatly and cleanly at the appropriate time. He has no use for writhing trails of smoke, those that seep into the air, filling spaces small and large, the weave between threads, the hollow between walls, the breath between heartbeats. 

Erik likes his little comforts. His bastions, his strongholds. 

Charles wishes to give.

::

_He has always loved to have Erik near; even though he has been locked away with the clamour in his head for so long that Erik has learned to embrace another, even though Erik was the one who held the key, he cannot resist the circle of his arms._

_Charles touches and touches, here the breadth of Erik’s chest, there, the dearness of his cheek, oh there, the stubbornness of his jaw…._

_Erik wishes to save him, and that’s lovely, it’s lovely, but when has he ever succeeded?_

::

Once, as a child, he burned.

An accident of the cane harvest, it could be called, or, with equal verisimilitude, a boyish prank: one stepbrother directing another to that particular quadrant of the field on that particular day.

When cane burns, the sky turns to ash and the sun is lost. The chaff billows upwards, soot and embers and the burning skeletons of dead leaves; below, hordes of snakes and beetles and unwanted creeping things swarm over one another out to the open air, desperate for life.

Animal instinct. He followed it when there was nothing left.

His scars are shiny and white. On his back, where his shirt caught fire; on the soles of his feet; on his hands and arms where he shoved aside burning stalks. Touch them, and there is no pain. But Charles remembers it well: the sweet silence in his head while his body screamed.

::

At night the heat lies dark and heavy, close as sweat on skin. The windows are lifted in invitation to any stray breeze that may condescend to enter; in the garden, cicadas chitter and sing, raucous and wild-voiced. The night is ungovernable.

This is when he begins to lose himself. This is when he is terrified.

Charles wakes gasping, body taut and aching, smothered not by the heat but by someone else’s dream. Sometimes the words that press on his lips are a friend’s, sometimes a stranger’s; other times they are as confused and nameless as the cries of competing swarms.

Erik may stir. He will kiss Charles’ neck, lift the thin cotton of his chemise, slide his palms over Charles’ stomach, his chest. Charles will hear _belonging_ in the spread of his fingers, feel welcome in the open door of Erik’s mind.

He may not. Charles, in his mind’s drowning terror, may lash the entire household into quietness, and find himself alone but for the insects and distant whispers he cannot trace. Or he may slam the gaol door upon himself, and become next to impossible to wake, lost beneath the waves.

Erik is at his most decisive when he is frightened. 

England will be good for Charles.

::

_They fall together, two dark silhouettes against an ashen sky, the rush of the wind lost to Charles’ ears beneath the peal of bells across a distant sea._

_Erik’s power stops the descent. It can do nothing for the conflagration: his great home is a ruin that Charles has wrought, his body is at the mercy of the smoke that fills their lungs and rules their breath. Charles feels Erik’s ribs ache; his eyes sting; his hands bleed. He feels his heart._

_Erik’s power can do nothing against Charles’ mind._

_Faithfulness came to ruin long ago. A breach for a breach: now Charles shall have his due, the door to Erik’s mind his to make use of however he wishes. Love is a vow charred but intact, an ember roused even now to flame, and belonging has never held more truth: Erik is his, and he Erik’s, and none shall put asunder._


End file.
